sharepoint

GimmalPoint (www.gimmalpoint.com) for Windows 8 and Windows Phone enables consumers to connect to SharePoint and view documents, sites, lists, libraries and more in multiple views. It’s billed as the most featured-rich solution available on Microsoft’s app stores and is developed by Liquid Daffodil.

We've covered these apps in the past, passing through beta testing and going gold. Today, we’re looking at a significant update. But not only do we have a new release, but there is a special offer exclusively available for Windows Phone Central readers.

Have you been enjoying the GimmalPoint beta, or have been eagerly awaiting the app to be released on Windows Phone? We have some good news for you as the final version of GimmalPoint for Windows Phone is now available. If you're not familiar with the name, it's the Windows Phone version of GimmalPoint, developed by Liquid Daffodil​.

Gimmal ​ (www.gimmal.com) is working hard on their Windows Phone version of GimmalPoint, developed by Liquid Daffodil​. You may well be familiar with the name, we last looked at the Windows 8 version when Liquid Daffodil were looking for folk to help get through issues reported by users. This was reported to be a successful venture so we're back again with another request for community input?.

Liquid Daffodil is seeking testers for GimmalPoint on the Windows Store. The app (owned by GimmalPoint - http://www.gimmal.com/) enables SharePoint users to connect and view sites, documents, lists, libraries and more in multiple views. Billed as the "most full-featured" SharePoint solution available on Microsoft's desktop store, Liquid Daffodil is running into some problems with a handful of reports from users who can't seem to connect.

Since the team is unable to reproduce said issues, they're looking out to the community to get some testers on-board.

Last summer Microsoft posted a collection of free eBooks and over 1 million copies were downloaded by geeks around the globe. Now, once again, the company is offering up a collection of completely free literature for your consumption in EPUB, MOBI, or PDF formats.

Today the SharePoint Team at Microsoft announced that a standalone SkyDrive Pro client is available to download for Windows machines. The Pro edition of SkyDrive allows users to easily save, sync, share, and collaborate on documents in SharePoint. It is worth noting that the new client, is only compatible with SharePoint 2013 servers and Office 365.

SkyDrive Pro was pre-bundled (although not functional for all users until now) with Office 365 Pro Plus, Office 365 Small Business Premium, and Office Professional Plus 2013. If you have any of the aforementioned Office suites installed on your PC, there is no need to download SkyDrive Pro separately.

Microsoft has released an official SharePoint app for Windows Phone, enabling users to stay connected with colleagues using service backend functionality and features. Newsfeeds from SharePoint sites are displayed, which can be added to, with the ability to follow people, access documents, tags and more.

On June 14th, rumors were circulating that Microsoft was poised to buy Yammer, a social-network and messaging service for enterprise, for at least $1 billion dollars. Speculation cooled down a bit as Microsoft intended to focus on the Surface and Windows Phone 8 announcements but a new week is upon us and so the deal is now official.

Microsoft has now purchased Yammer (www.yammer.com) for a massive $1.2 billion in cash and it will be folded into the Microsoft Office Division, led by division President Kurt DelBene. The team will continue to report to current CEO David Sacks to maintain continuity, at least for the near future.

A statement from Microsoft on the acquisition states

“The acquisition of Yammer underscores our commitment to deliver technology that businesses need and people love. Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.”

Yammer is only four years old but has nearly 5 million users including employees at 85 percent of the Fortune 500, making it an interesting and strategic purchase. So why the acquisition even though Microsoft has Lync and Sharepoint already? Mary Jo Foley (ZDNet) ruminates that Microsoft "...needed a cooler brand and wanted the cross-platform support" which sounds about right to us.

Avanade, business solutions and managed services provider, has sealed a new partnership with Microsoft to develop and release enterprise solutions and services for Windows Phone. The strategic relationship, announced today, will see Avanade collaborate with Microsoft to develop said applications to enhance business productivity and increase the rate of adoption throughout the sector.

Avanade executive vice president, Ian Jordan, has said that the two companies will also be working closely with Accenture, and as additional investment into the platform, Avanade is building "Windows Phone Centers of Excellence" in the United States, Europe, China and India, which will bring foster innovations that address the specific needs of enterprises, mobile operators and original equipment manufacturers (OEM).

"Microsoft’s strength in consumer, enterprise solutions and cloud services positions it well to create a compelling mobile offering to empower a new generation of consumers and organisations. Today’s announcement will stimulate innovation in mobility, leading to new services and solutions to create greater value for mobile customers."

Avanade will also be enabling unique business productivity functionality by integrating Microsoft Dynamics, SharePoint and Lync into the mobile platform. Paul Bryan, senior director of the Windows Phone division at Microsoft, goes onto talk about businesses requesting a new wave of mobile solutions to meet the increasing expectations of both employees and consumers.

All in all, interesting stuff. It'll be interesting to see how Microsoft tackles business and the working sector with Windows Phone (and Windows 8).

For those who work with SharePoint, you may want to take a look at the little app Microsoft just pushed out called SharePoint Hub. It features the SharePoint official blog, Twitter and Facebook integration and basically keeps you abreast of what is happening in that small corner of the world. By no means is it a killer app, it's still a neat little info app that we imagine some of you will make use of:

"Connect to the Microsoft SharePoint community via your phone. The SharePoint Community app connects you to the latest information direct from the SharePoint product group blog, as well as information on news events. You can also connect directly with the SharePoint community via Facebook and Twitter."

Yammer, the Facebook for enterprises, has announced that they're looking to launch an official app for Windows Phone 7. Built from the ground up, this soon-to-be freely available app will bring social interaction to the enterprise level for employees who use WP7. It is also stated that the app will be Mango compatible.

"Windows Phone offers software developers a best in class operating system and developer tools, and Yammer is a great example of the new wave of business apps partners are creating with these new capabilities. We're excited to see new cutting-edge business apps, like Yammer, join our growing app ecosystem and pleased to offer a way to help grow their business with Windows Phone Marketplace."

David Sacks, founder and CEO, Yammer had this to say about WP7:

"Millions of Windows Phone users will be able to access Yammer to connect with their colleagues and collaborate on the go. Many of our large enterprise customers rely on Microsoft technology to run their businesses. As we rapidly advance Yammer's enterprise social networking capabilities, we will continue to partner closely with Microsoft to integrate core Yammer functionality into its offerings."

As well as the WP7 news, Yammer has also announced a new version of its integration with Microsoft SharePoint. Yammer SharePoint 3.0 Web Part provides a real-time social layer to the SharePoint platform, making it more social, mobile and engaging for enterprise employees.

wp7geek, over at myWindowsPhone, has gone into some detail about how he couldn't access SharePoint via the Office Hub, but could successfully connect in the IE mobile browser. Upon attempting to connect from the Office Hub, the following error message was displayed:

Sharepoint doesn't support this authentication scheme. For assistance contact the person who manages this SharePoint site. You can try opening the content in your web browser instead.

wp7geek moved onto explain the cause of this error, which is apparently due to WP7 not supporting NTLM authentication that is used to login on hosted SharePoint servers. While a workaround is possible until Office Hub is updated, it requires changes on the server side of the connection, which involves contacting your host. They would need to either:

Deploy a Forefront UAG server (UAG settings are built into Office hub)

Enable Forms Based Authentication on the SharePoint Site

Forms Based Authentication (FBA) is basically creating your own login method. To authenticate, a SQL Server, XML, Windows Live IDs, etc can be used. Existing Windows Identities must be migrated to FBA identities to avoid multiple SharePoint identities for a single person. This makes it problematic for hosting companies who may have huge internal SharePoint deployments which reply on windows authentication.

Should you not have the above authentication implemented then you should be able to access the server through Office Hub, but unfortunately if they're not present then you're stuck with IE on your phone for SharePoint.

Microsoft is one of the most diverse technology companies in the world. Search, Gaming, enterprise class Mail and Storage solutions, and of course Mobile; Microsoft is among the world leaders in all of these areas.

Microsoft Office is one of the most popular software suites ever. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have been used by millions of people throughout the world. As such a popular set of tools, the Office products are also the de facto standard for document portability. Because of the sheer popularity of Office, even competing products are forced to offer as much support for Office documents as possible.

Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s attempt to put their best foot forward in the mobile market. But how does the Office Hub live up to the high standards that Microsoft has set for itself? Read the review for my opinion.

Watching the growth of Windows Phone 7 over this past year has been an exercise in patience. Microsoft’s strategy of showing the customers what they were working on months ahead of an actual release is very different that what one would expect from a company like Apple, where they announce a product only after it was already in production. The advantage of Microsoft’s strategy is that they have received feedback from both developers and consumers on the different features and functionality that will be included or (in some cases) left out. I really think Windows Phone 7 will be a better product because of this strategy.

Here's a video of Microsoft demoing the latest build of Windows Phone 7 at the TechEd conference currently going on.

Cloud computing and enterprise was the focus of this session with Sharepoint, Office, Excel and Outlook being featured in this presentation. Overall, the UI is looking real smooth with some nice animations and transitions--in fact, it looks zippier than earlier demonstrations. While full document editing is not really plausible on a smartphone, they stress the importance and ease of document-commenting in WP7 and show off how that works. They do this by opening an email, then modifying an Excel document via Sharepoint.

Plus, that whole spell-correction/word prediction thing has this sorry-speller sold.

It’s been a good week for those had concerns about how much effort Microsoft was going to put into their "legacy" Windows Mobile OS. First we get an update to Bing, which includes a fairly significant feature upgrade in voice assisted navigation. Today, Microsoft announced Office Mobile 2010 in conjunction with the release of the desktop and web versions of their flagship product.

According to the press release, users of Windows Mobile 6.5 that have a previous version of Office Mobile will be able to upgrade for free through the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Office Mobile 2010 adds support for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 as well as updated versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

If you haven’t already, head over to the Marketplace for your free copy. Let us know what you think!

Do note that the beta will expire on April 5, 2010, so don't be expecting to use this forever. We'll be tinkering with Office 2010 over the next few days. Share your thoughts in the comments, and let us know what you would like to see.